Assignments

1. Revision of Ad (now the second assignment)

Find a newspaper or magazine advertisement that you think would benefit from redesigning. As a way of beginning to learn some of our software, try to create this redesign in PageMaker, using a scanner and Photoshop to capture and manipulate images from the original. While staying within the parameters of the original ad (size, media, costs), your redesign should improve the ad not only visually, but rhetorically in how it implies images of its audience and the advertiser. More...

2. Logo/Banner/Icon (now the first assignment)

In this second assignment, you'll create a logo, Web-site banner and icon (e.g. ) for an organization or business (real or imaginary), a class, or perhaps for yourself or an individual you know. This coherently "designed" set of graphics will help create an identity for the client that will be used across both print and electronic media. You will produce these three graphics using Photoshop, and may combine photographs, scanned images, text, non-optically created graphics, etc. More...

3. New Media Writing

This project will ask you to begin a new media project by working in an old medium--writing. You'll write a three-to-five page essay or account. After discussing the essay with me, you'll then repurpose or "remediate" that material to create a Web site that fulfills the same purposes except in a digital environment. More...

4. Analytical Essay I: Three Ways of Looking at a Document

Write an five-to-seven-page essay analyzing a single document. Use and cite David Levy's book to talk about your chosen document not simply in terms of how it is written, designed and produced--the material or technological aspects that most people would first see--but as it functions in three ways: to claim possession, to express individual or group identity, and to memorialize some social experience. More...

5. Bookmark/Web Site

Campus is covered with flyers given out from offices and display tables, or posters that line the hallways. These documents earnestly provide information about programs, clubs, happenings, products, etc., but utlimately they're just paper paper paper--to be filed, tucked, folded, stacked, and, someday, thrown away. They say too much and, at the same time, too little. What to do?

Adopt one of these unloved flyers/posters and approach its task with a new strategy. Create an attractive bookmark that publicizes what the flyer/poster once offered, and provides a Web address. Then create a companion Web page (or site) for that Web address where complete and up-to-date information can be found. Use design elements on both the bookmark and Web page(s) to give the whole project a coherent look and feel. More...

6. Client Project

You will create a document project for a real-life client on campus or in the local area. More...

7. Analytical Essay II: "Scrolling Forward"

Write an eight-to-twelve-page essay in which you engage a particular question or issue raised by Levy in Scrolling Forward by recounting in detail an experience with the class projects this semester and/or an experience you've had with creating documents. Then, project your analysis/experience forward to the possibilities of creative practice in your intended field of work (or perhaps in a political, civic or cultural endeavor that you will be involved with). More...